e-day - A mathematical holiday celebrated on February 7th

e-day - A mathematical holiday celebrated on February 7th
2018년 2월 7일

Today, February 7th, 2018, is called e-day because e is approximately 2.718, and this date is written 2/7/18 in some parts of the world.

e, also called Euler’s Number after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, is a very important constant that comes up in many different places in mathematics. The numer e was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli while studying compound interest where e arises as the limit of (1 + 1/n)n as n approaches infinity. e can also be calculated by summing:

The constant e appears naturally on the exponential function, which models growth. Hence, the same way that the constant π appears in everything that is round, the number e appears in everything that grows: size of baby animals, leaves in trees, bacteria populations, spreading of diseases, spirals in flowers and snails, radiactive decay of elements, money invested in a bank, processing power of computers… Everything that grows the faster the bigger it is follows an exponential law, and contains the number e.

e has an infinite number of digits. We prepared a website listing the first 60.000 digits of e and help you find your birthday in it:

e-day website

If we assign a number to each letter in the alphabet we can even find your name within the digits of e, along with the complete works of William Shakespeare, the ending of Game of Thrones (spoiler alert), the full text of the Wikipedia from the year 2030 or what you’ll have tomorrow for breakfast…

At least that’s what conjectured: It is conjectured that e is a normal number. In normal numbers every possible sequence of digits of a certain length appears with the same frequency. There are approximately as many 1s as 9s, as many 23s as 42s, as many 0000s as 1111s, etc. So within the infinite digits of a normal number we are able to find any possible sequence of any finite length.

Happy e-day to you!

관련 자료

All News

2016년 5월 25일
The deadline for our MathLapse competition will be extended to June 14, 2016!

A first MathLapse-Festival will be organized at the IMAGINARY conference (IC16), where the winners will be announced and their MathLapse movies will be screened. It is not necessary to...더 보기

2016년 3월 8일

Today, The Next Einstein Forum (NEF) Global Gathering 2016 starts in Dakar, Senegal. The three-day NEF Global Gathering will showcase often underreported scientific progress in Africa, holding up the NEF Fellows as examples of the exceptional scientific potential and progress across Africa....더 보기

2016년 2월 18일

Today, the first mathematical shopping center opens in Heidelberg, Germany. The Mathematikon shops are integrated into the building complex called Mathematikon.

Together with mathematicians from 14 countries, IMAGINARY created the mathematical content and is also...더 보기

2016년 1월 11일

IMAGINARY has launched a new educational and artistic format called “MathLapse” to highlight the link between mathematics and real-world phenomena. The name MathLapse (ML) is inspired by the timelapse-technique in physics: By re-scaling time, phenomena are visualized which we cannot observe directly.

A ML is short, simple, self-contained, creative and...더 보기

2015년 11월 16일
Shaping the future of mathematics communication

What is the future of mathematics communication? How does successful knowledge transfer in mathematics look like? What are its modern tools, concepts, and strategies? How can the public be engaged in a meaningful way?

IMAGINARY Conference on Open and Collaborative Communication of Mathematical Research 2016 (IC16) is an interdisciplinary...더 보기

페이지